IskatuMesk wrote:All of the sites that guy lists are clickbait sites, so... yeah.

Time Magazine, among others? Well, you could define all magazines as 'clickbait' in that they want to catch your attention and get you reading their content. As far as whether the various authors are being disingenuous, their arguments echo what is often heard any time an issue like this crops up: That evocative imagery of women = objectification = bad. Such a line of thought depends on an underlying presupposition that sex, being sexual, or sexualization is inherently negative, devaluing, degrading, and shameful. Yet we wouldn't be here without sex, so how does that work?

There are strong parallels in both these cases. They both involve a 'butt pose', and were decried as sexual when the context doesn't support that assertion at all. Spider Woman is crawling about, and Tracer is looking over her shoulder. That's all. Both also have male counterparts in the exact same positions, too.

Looking deeper into the matter, I see Blizzard didn't actually agree with the objector and instead replaced the pose with a similar, but more playful, pinup-style pose.

Whether it was an honest miscommunication for which Blizzard apologized, a manufactured controversy marketing ploy, or a troll on SJWs, in the end I'm just glad the "sex-is-bad" mindset didn't win out.

I don't trust career journalism, especially in regards to a medium where there is no actual journalism (gaming). They only attempt to ride the waves of the current trending headlines like knee-jerk SJW bullshit because it attracts clicks and they know it. See: Sandy Beaches.

You may not trust career journalism, but many do, as the Sandy Beaches guy lamented after his experiment. I'd say Maddox fact-checking and addressing the bullshit from so many big magazine labels is a step in the right direction.

The even bigger problem is that some developers are starting to get these overreactions to an extremely tiny minority (an individual in the case of Blizzard, one who was very likely just a troll) because they're so afraid of going against media opinion. It has gotten to the point where some Japanese developers are pre-emptively censoring their games (including their own localizations) or just not exporting them to the West entirely. Unfortunately, these developers do not actually research their target audience and realize it's just an extremely vocal minority and a corrupt media circle that generates "bad press" by extent of being in each other's pockets.